Gender coding in job advertisements for academic, non-academic, and leadership positions in emergency medicine

Gender disparities continue to exist in emergency medicine (EM) despite increasing percentages of women in medical school and residencies. Prior studies in other male dominated industries have shown using masculine or feminine-coded language in job advertisements affects the proportion of male versus female applicants who choose to apply for those jobs. The goal of this study was to determine if gender-coding exists in EM job advertisements, and to see if there were differences between academic vs. non-academic jobs or administrative vs. non-administrative jobs.

This was a cross sectional study of EM jobs advertised in the United States on 13 academic and non-academic medical job databases from September 2020-February 2021. Using a gender decoder program based on prior research by Gaucher et al. on gendered wording in job advertisements, we analyzed each job to determine if the job advertisement was overall highly masculine, masculine, highly feminine, feminine, or neutral. Each job was categorized as academic, non-academic, administrative, or non-administrative. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and chi-square analysis.

Seventy-four EM job advertisements were posted during the study period. Forty-four (59.4%) of these coded out as masculine or strongly masculine, 18 (24.3%) coded out as feminine or strongly feminine, and 12 (16.2%) were neutral. Only one job advertisement contained no gender-coded words. There were no differences in the gender-coding of academic, non-academic, or administrative jobs.

Job advertisements for EM physicians tend to contain more masculine-coded language. Almost all job advertisements for emergency medicine physicians in this study contained at least one gender-coded word. Further studies could explore whether changing the language of job advertisements in EM has an impact on the proportion of women who choose to apply to EM jobs.